Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience, such as playing various media and multimedia content on their personal or laptop computers. For example, most computers today are able to play compact discs (CDs) so users can listen to their favorite musical artists while working on their computers. Many computers are also equipped with digital versatile disc (DVD) drives enabling users to watch movies.
When music is played on a personal computer (PC) from compressed media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and WINDOWS MEDIA technologies audio (WMA) files, the PC typically holds in memory a complete database of all albums, artists, genres, years, etc., and allows the user to navigate amongst these attributes. However, when music is copied to a writeable CD or DVD and played in a portable CD player, car receiver, DVD player, or any other consumer electronic device having a relatively low power processor, limited memory availability, cheap drive mechanism and often limited display and user input capabilities, the same scope of metadata is not available.
Presently available media players that render compressed media content can take a long time to start playback of audio (e.g., typically around thirty seconds, but some can take several minutes or more). The slow start-up time of such media players is due in part to the time needed for the media player to scan the entire medium storing the media content to build a list of files that the media player can render along with any relevant metadata (e.g., title, artist, and genre) retrieved from each individual media file. Often, existing media players do not retrieve or display any metadata associated with the compressed media content. Such existing media players fail to provide rich navigation capabilities such as play-by-genre or play-by-artist. The lack of rich navigation capabilities is due in part to insufficient memory and processing power of the existing media players to sort and aggregate the metadata from the media content into menus and playlists dynamically.
For these reasons, a system for optimizing media player memory usage during rendering is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.